To assist you, there is a worksheet associated with this lab that
contains examples and even solutions to some of the exercises. You can
copy that worksheet to your home directory by going to your computer's Start menu and choose run. In the run field type:

\\filer\calclab

when you hit enter, you can then choose MA1024 and then choose the worksheet

Pardiff_start_B12.mw

Remember to immediately save it in your own home directory. Once you've copied and saved the worksheet, read through the background on the internet and the background of the worksheet before starting the exercises.

For a function of a single real variable, the derivative
gives information on whether the graph of is increasing or
decreasing. Finding where the derivative is zero was important in
finding extreme values. For a function of two (or more)
variables, the situation is more complicated.

A differentiable function, , of two variables has two partial
derivatives:
and
. As you have learned in class, computing partial derivatives is
very much like computing regular derivatives. The main difference is
that when you are computing
, you must treat
the variable as if it was a constant and vice-versa when computing
.

The Maple commands for computing partial derivatives are D
and diff. The Getting Started worksheet has examples
of how to use these commands to compute partial derivatives.